“Ethics When You Least Expect It”
A Modular Approach to Short Course Data Ethics Instruction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21688447 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Louise Bezuidenhout (0000-0003-2554-9297, University of Oxford, corresponding author), Robert Quick (0000-0002-0994-728X, Indiana University Bloomington), Hugh Shanahan (0000-0003-1374-6015, Royal Holloway University of London) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 2189-2213 |
| Publication date | 2020-08-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science and Engineering Ethics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1353-3452 • E-ISSN: 1471-5546 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s11948-020-00197-2 |
| PMID | 32067185 |
| OpenAlex | W3008844350 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 21 |
Data science skills are rapidly becoming a necessity in modern science. In response to this need, institutions and organizations around the world are developing research data science curricula to teach the programming and computational skills that are needed to build and maintain data infrastructures and maximize the use of available data. To date, however, few of these courses have included an explicit ethics component, and developing such components can be challenging. This paper describes a novel approach to teaching data ethics on short courses developed for the CODATA-RDA Schools for Research Data Science. The ethics content of these schools is centred on the concept of open and responsible (data) science citizenship that draws on virtue ethics to promote ethics of practice. Despite having little formal teaching time, this concept of citizenship is made central to the course by distributing ethics content across technical modules. Ethics instruction consists of a wide range of techniques, including stand-alone lectures, group discussions and mini-exercises linked to technical modules. This multi-level approach enables students to develop an understanding both of “responsible and open (data) science citizenship”, and of how such responsibilities are implemented in daily research practices within their home environment. This approach successfully locates ethics within daily data science practice, and allows students to see how small actions build into larger ethical concerns. This emphasises that ethics are not something “removed from daily research” or the remit of data generators/end users, but rather are a vital concern for all data scientists
Citizenship · Curriculum · Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Information ethics · Modular design · Pedagogy · Philosophy of science · Political science · Research ethics · Sociology · Computer Science · Engineering · Ethics in Clinical Research · Research Data Management Practices · Scientific Computing and Data Management
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |